george orwell

Stephen Harper, John Baird, Laurie Hawn and the rest of the boys yesterday finally got the war in Iraq they've been pining for since 2003.

"We should have been there shoulder to shoulder with our allies," Prime Minister Harper, who was still the leader of the opposition, complained back in April 2003. At the time, the United States had just invaded Iraq to punish it for having nothing to do with 9/11 and having no weapons of mass destruction, although we were told a slightly different version at the time.

Long-time Tory pollster and strategist Allan Gregg ripped into the Harper Government on Saturday for what he termed its "systematic attack on evidence-based research."

But since Gregg was speaking to the annual convention of the Alberta Federation of Labour, his startling comments went completely unremarked by Alberta's mainstream media -- notwithstanding the readily available "local angle" of an Edmonton native who did well in the big cities down east returning to his old stomping ground for a few hours.

Like Sir John A. Macdonald, a British subject I was born and now, apparently, a British subject I may die. What's with that?

Or did I fail to get it right yesterday that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his gang of so-called Conservatives have decided to give up he trappings of independent nationhood and, just as the Scots are about to head out for the Highlands, go in with the British on a joint-venture diplomatic service?

It would be easy to make fun of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's control-freak Conservatives for yesterday's revelation in the mainstream media that they have tried to put a deep chill on reporting about the Ice Age.

Leastways, it was a story about the Ice Age that tipped the media to the fact the Harper government has muzzled scientists employed by Natural Resources Canada, instructing them to say nothing about anything without the approval of political commissars in the office of Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis.

Last week, a reader sent a link to a Slate article on the new wave of sexual judgment-mongering among Gen Y and suggested I might want to address the issue here. I wasn't sure I was the one to write this because A) I spent my college years (undergrad and grad) at schools and/or in programs that lacked the traditional qualities necessary to foster a thriving campus hook-up culture - no Greek systems, significantly unequal male/female enrollment stats, nose-to-the-grindstone academic focus, etc. and B) wherever there's a loop, I'm guaranteed to be out of it.